Garlic photo available from Shutterstock

Rumi once wrote:

“My poems resemble the bread of Egypt – one night passes over it, and you can’t eat it any more.  So gobble them down now, while they’re still fresh, before the dust of the world settles on them. [...] And even if you eat my poems while they’re still fresh, you still have to bring forward many images yourself.  Actually, friend, what you’re eating is your own imagination.”

Fascinating imagery, isn’t it?  To read a poem you have to bring your own images (BYOI), you have to populate the black-and-white sterility of language with colors of your associations.

Same with eating: “actually, friend, what you’re eating is your own imagination.”  The imagination you bring to the moment of eating distracts you from  the actual moment of eating: as you soon as you think that you are eating “this,” you are no longer eating “this.”  The labeling, the expectations, the projections that we bring to a moment of eating get in the way of experiencing a given eating moment in its here-and-now uniqueness.

Solution?

Bring your own mindfulness (BYOM) or run the risk of this eating moment going the way of the bread of Egypt – a thought passes over it and it’s stale.

ps:

I am sure the bread of Egypt is awesome if accompanied by BYOM.

Woman eating photo available from Shutterstock

Socrates (in reply to Antipho, in defense of a philosophical way of life) said about eating:

“He who eats with most pleasure is he who least requires sauce.”

What does that mean in today’s self-help lingo?

“He/she who eats with most mindfulness (with most presence, with most savoring-of-the-moment) requires no dessert (or seconds).”

That’s my spin on this ancient pearl of wisdom: a philosophical tooth is a sweet tooth.

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Adapted from “Reinventing the Dessert” (Reinventing the Meal, Somov, 2012).

Eating is predatory touch—touch turned into destruction. The first touch is taste, as the molecules of flavor intermingle with the tongue. Then we must grind the food down to a pulp (touching it again and again) before we swallow it. Then we digest (and therefore again touch) the food through chemical hand-to-hand combat. We certainly touch the food as it moves through us, along the length of the digestive tract—the tube that runs through us—in a kind of gustatory massage of peristalsis wherein we are now touched by the reality we swallowed.

Mahadevi, a twelfth-century female devotee of Shiva, suggested another option:

“Finger may squeeze the fig to feel it, yet not choose to eat it” (Ramanujan 1973, 133).

Indeed, why not, every now and then, touch food without eating it? Why not, on occasion, take the predatory element of touch out of eating? Rescue one of the apples you brought home from its digestive fate by tossing it out the window. Let the random chaos of nature do the chewing for you this time. Set a precedent of nonpredatory, nonutilitarian touch.

For a change, let food be something other than food, and let yourself be more than just an eater.

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Adapted from Reinventing the Meal (Somov, 2011).

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Indian architecture offers an intriguing reversal of the concept that the body is a temple, as described by Indian poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan (1973, 20):

Indian temples are traditionally built in the image of the human body. The ritual for building a temple begins with…planting a pot of seed. The temple is said to rise from the implanted seed, like a human. The different parts of a temple are named after body parts. The two sides are called the hands or wings, the hasta; a pillar is called a foot, pada. The top of the temple is the head, the sikhara. The shrine, the innermost and the darkest sanctum of the temple, is a garbhagrha, the womb-house. The temple thus carries out in brick and stone the primordial blueprint of the human body.

Nifty—but entirely unnecessary. Here’s what another Indian poet Basavanna had to say on the topic:

“The rich will make temples for Siva. What shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold. Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay” (Ramanujan 1973, 20).

Indeed, why imitate what you already have? Your body is a temple. Why build another one? For that matter, why burn the gas to drive your Self to where you are not in the name of worship? Why not worship at home?

What do I mean by “worship”? I mean love. However you want to see the ultimate source—Reality, Creation, Universe, Dao, Cosmos—find a way to connect to it, from within and without brokers.

Even if your body isn’t a temple, it certainly has one. Touch your index finger to the side of your head to point to the cupola of golden presence inside the brick-and-mortar of your skull. And as you next partake of the sacrifice of life that is food, sanctify it with your presence.

When you know yourself, there is no need …

A Moment of Brightness

I am a voracious non-fiction reader, a binge-reader, you could say.  Most of the books I buy are random finds (from used book stores, thrift stores; or when following a chain of associations with the help of Amazon.com).  Whenever I buy books in the physical (rather than virtual) world, I often start from the back.  I browse the last three or so pages of the book – not because I want to know how something ends, but because a book is like a life and its last pages are like the last few breaths: there is something powerfully evanescent about that, a unique kind of intimacy, a moment where the author finally lets go of the pen and returns to the original blank space of the mind-page…

Knowing how we part ways is a good introduction to each other.

So, let me share the last few pages of “Reinventing the Meal,” in case we – reader and author – never meet on the first page.

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You are an amazing transmutation machine. You can take in carrots, candy bars, baked beans, bread, plums, porridge, hamburgers, or herrings—and turn them into living energy and whatever body parts you need. A carrot takes light, air, water, and earth, converting them into a crunchy, pointy, orange vegetable, and you turn this carrot into a moving, intelligent, seeing, human being. What an amazing world!

Gregory Sams, Sun of gOd

The big meal-wheel has been spinning, mostly mindlessly, without much frontal-lobe supervision, for at least as long as there has been life on this planet. Our collective evolutionary history is a survival treadmill. Life has been in the business of inventing and reinventing ever-new metabolic cycles, with life-forms finding sustenance in each others’ waste, learning how to squeeze every morsel of energy out of their environment, climbing the pyramid of the solar economy through predatory competition, and also working out mutually beneficial symbiotic energy trusts.

We, the human animals, are the first species to talk about the ethics of eating our fellow life-forms. …